interactive music performance
This piece was performed live at Schwankhalle in Bremen and MS Stubnitz in Hamburg in 2022. The audience has been taken along a psychedelic audio-visual experience: The exploration of a volcano.
The performer transformed the stage into a provisory research camp high up in the mountains equipped with scientific gear,
camping utensils and volcanic rock samples.
While noting down measurement data in a little book, the live webcam takes close-up images of the examined objects. These are projected on a huge screen and are visible for the audience, that have the perspective of a team at the research centre base.
The detailed images are blended into a volcano landscape.
Inside the mountain might hover an individual letter, that disappears, as soon as another one replaces it, when the researcher types onto her laptop to document new research data. The reading goes into the horizon, you don’t read from left to right, but you have to be patient, starring at the same point, hoping for a new letter to appear while remembering the old one. Each letter is connected to a specific sound and thus each word gets its own sonic character.
At some point the listener gets invited to become an actor, people can interact and write with the performer.The improvised text arises questions, someone writes about love, an abstract dialogue on the way to the inner of the earth begins.
The communication between the base and the mountain station ends up in loops of data repeating over and over again.
Cryptic code of numbers and letters appears, audible as a wild eclectic sound collage that flows over the ephemeral landscape.
An abstract data jungle, it's not really clear, what is actually being noted. It's a reflection on the huge amount of data input we are faced with every day.
And the approach to transform it into an audio-visual experience, an interactive data instrument played through writing.
At the end an astronaut flies from the hypothetical research camp into the projected volcano landscape and appears on it first as a digital processed image through the webcam,
then with its own physical shadow caused by the encounter with the light beam, dedicating a love song to Etna: Melting together
Falling apart
Floating around
It's so hard to resist
I would love to jump into you
You are so hot
You are so